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"We look at segments; we don't do that much work with demographics because our products tend to stretch across the range of age groups," observes Moray Callum, design chief for Mazda, who adds, "It's usually the car enthusiasts within the segments, and car enthusiasts aren't always in the same demographics. They're 17 to 97." So with that enthusiast brief in mind, Mazda designers go to work, developing vehicles that will appeal to those people, not to some fictitious persona. They don't work alone, however. As Franz von Holzhausen, Mazda North American Operations' director of Design, observes, "We have a process that brings design, marketing and product planning together as a team to develop concepts for our brand." He explains that they look at a "positioning map," one that shows different vehicle categories and where Mazda products ought to be located on that grid. He points out, for example, that the RX-8 was a product that is a result of having identified an open space on the map for a niche-type vehicle, so they developed it.

Another mechanism that is deployed for vehicle development at Mazda is called the "Triple A, or Annual Advanced Activity process," which Callum describes as a gathering of different types of people from throughout the organization who get together and "come up with the new concepts that we feel will differentiate Mazda as a brand." He emphasizes. "It's specifically for new concepts." One of which is the Kabura, which was designed by von Holzhausen, a designer who came to Mazda from General Motors, where he'd managed the design process for vehicles including the Pontiac Solstice (arguably one of the closest competitors to the Mazda MX-5--von Holzhausen, by his own admission, is a driving enthusiast, so it is no wonder that he worked on the Solstice ... and was interested in working at Mazda).